HPV researchers, Planned Parenthood win prestigious medical awards

Published 12:05 pm, Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Planned Parenthood won for providing “essential health services and reproductive care” to millions of women. The awards are sometimes referred to as “America’s Nobels.”

Planned Parenthood won for providing “essential health services and reproductive care” to millions of women. The awards are sometimes referred to as “America’s Nobels.”

Photo: Susanne Neal/Dreamstime, TNS

HPV researchers, Planned Parenthood win prestigious medical awards

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WASHINGTON — The Lasker Awards, among the most prestigious in medicine, will go to two National Cancer Institute researchers whose work led to the development of vaccines that prevent cervical cancer, and to Planned Parenthood for providing “essential health services and reproductive care” to millions of women, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation said Wednesday.

In announcing the awards, sometimes referred to as “America’s Nobels,” the foundation lauded the recipients’ efforts to protect and enhance women’s health. Its praise of Planned Parenthood seemed designed to counter attacks on the nonprofit by President Trump and top congressional Republicans, who want to end all federal funding to the organization. Planned Parenthood, the nation’s biggest abortion provider, already is barred from using federal dollars for abortions.

The foundation also honored Michael Hall, a molecular biologist at the Biozentrum University of Basel, for discoveries involving the role of proteins called TOR in controlling cell growth. It said his discoveries “have broadened our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that underlie growth, development and aging.”

The prizes, which come with $250,000, are awarded to researchers, clinicians and others who have made major advances in the prevention and treatment of disease. They are sometimes seen as a harbinger of the Nobel Prize; 87 Lasker laureates have also won Nobels.

The target of the two NCI scientists honored — Douglas Lowy, the institute’s acting director, and John Schiller, a longtime researcher there — was the disease that kills 250,000 women around the world every year. “They devised a blueprint for several safe and effective vaccines that promise to slash the incidence of cervical cancer and mortality,” the foundation said.

That work by the longtime collaborators, who will share the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, enabled the development of vaccines for the human papillomavirus. HPV also underlies cancers of the vulva, penis, anus and throat.

HPV infections, the most common of sexually transmitted infections, usually go away without treatment. But in the early 1980s, German virologist Harald zur Hausen linked cervical cancer to particular viral strains. “That made crystal clear that HPV was incredibly important,” Lowy said.